Thursday, November 17, 2011

Beautiful Days

Thomas Bernhard, the
Austrian writer who, at his death in 1984, left instructions expressly
prohibiting publication of his works in Austria for a full 70 years after his
death, includes in his novel Correction a slightly less than flattering
assessment of his homeland:

Austria,
this most misunderstood country in the world, this country more problematical
than any other in all world history…this state that was economically more
decrepit than any other, which had nothing left, apart from its congenital imbecility,
but its hypocrisy…once the center of Europe [Austria] was…no longer anything
but a rummage sale of intellectual and cultural history, an unsold remainder of
government merchandise…every Austrian is born to failure…his so-called homeland
is actually, for him as for so many others, nothing but a horrible lifelong
punishment for existing, for the blameless act of having been born in the first
place…

This eviscerating passage
might have served as an epigraph for the stunning short novel Schöne Tage
(1974, translated into English by Anselm Hollo as Beautiful Days) by
Bernhard’s Austrian contemporary Franz Innerhofer. Innerhofer may not provide
quite as explicit a condemnation as Bernhard, but the picture he portrays of
Austria works its way even more infectiously under the skin, a relentless
catalog of recriminations that point an accusing finger at the “brutality and
neglect” that mark the society Innerhofer depicts. It would be difficult to
imagine a work with a more cuttingly ironic title.

Set in the economic
wreckage of the years immediately following World War II in the farming country
in Austria’s north, Beautiful Days, Innerhofer’s first novel and the
first volume of a trilogy, begins with a curious opening line:

Torn
away from the care of a childless woman, Holl suddenly found himself transplanted
in an alien world.

Over the next few
paragraphs, we are able to put the line in context, recognizing that Holl,
Innerhofer’s vulnerable young protagonist, has in fact only recently been born
(his birth coinciding approximately and symbolically with the end of World War
II). Holl might as well not have come into the world, however, given what
proceeds from his initial experience of being “torn away,” for the following
pages depict an almost endless stream of abuses heaped upon the poor,
illegitimate child. This initial separation from a “childless woman,” his
caretaker for his first two years, is but the first of several wrenching
dislocations. His next years are spent in wretched poverty with his mother, distinguishable
from other adults chiefly by her being “the one who spanked him more often than
any of the others,” and a neglectful stepfather, who has led “an unimaginably hard
life from childhood on,” in Holl’s youth occupying the social status of disgraced
former Nazi, “a pariah, full of inarticulate rage” (“inarticulate rage” is a
recurrent phrase that characterizes the state of most of the adults in Beautiful
Days). At age six Holl, essentially a welfare charge, is abruptly shunted
off to live on Farm 48 in Haudorf in northern Austria with the father he’s
never known, a brutish lug referred to in the novel only as “The Farmer,” and a
cold stepmother, “The Wife.” Their identification by social role underscores
his new guardians’ functional, passive-aggressive behavior towards Holl, whom
they treat as little more than a nuisance and slave, and who seems to exist only
“in terms of chores to be performed.” His new family simply replaces one set of
abusive adults with another (Haudorf proves an apt name for the area in which
Farm 48 is located, as the word’s root literally translates as “beaten down”). Holl
is thrust into backbreaking farm work scarcely fit for an adult, let alone a mere
child, and spends his long days in mud and manure, in fields and stables,
valued beneath the livestock and, at home, berated and beaten into submission. The
abuses Innerhofer catalogs in Beautiful Days brutalize the reader as
well in both their individual occurrences and their cumulative effect, and it
is only Holl’s inner resistance and instinctive sense of the injustice of it
all – as well as Innerhofer’s tremendous talent as a writer - that makes the novel
bearable in the least.

The starkly
unsentimental, largely realist style of Beautiful Days leads the reader
through Holl’s bleak daily cycle of bedwettings, physical and psychological
abuse, hard labor, and unwelcoming home life, punctuated for the most part only
by the oppressive heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter, by accident and
death among the other workers and the livestock (calamities apathetically absorbed
by the adults as though they were inevitabilities). Despite this gritty realism,
Innerhofer also strings Holl’s tale onto a frame that allows his story to be
seen as both particular and universal; Holl’s sufferings are not simply his
own, but represent those inflicted by the failures of society as a whole.
Innerhofer directs his condemnation of the treatment Holl receives not only at
its immediate perpetrators but also at the institutions that allow such barbarities
against children. Thus Holl’s anticipation that these institutions will
intervene in some way to lessen his oppression meets with repeated
disappointment. A burgeoning hope that mandatory schooling might provide an
escape valve, that “homework…would liberate him from labor” (an almost
certainly deliberate reformulation of the “Arbeit macht frei” of Hitler’s camps),
evaporates as school quickly reveals itself as simply another piece of the
machinery designed to keep children like Holl from attaining personhood, just
another place where adults feel free to strike and degrade him. The church acts
as an equally dehumanizing institution, designed to enforce ideology and
conformity rather than provide solace or alleviate suffering. The ineffectual visits
from child welfare officials, who fail to look beyond social surfaces carefully
polished by adults eager to put the best face forward so as to mask the daily brutalities
they inflict, reveal a welfare system abjectly derelict in its duties.

Innerhofer employs
several remarkable narrative elements in Beautiful
Days to enhance and deepen Holl’s riveting story. In his depiction of Holl’s
earliest years, action is largely reduced to gesture, to a kind of high
contrast, minimalist presentation of reality that reflects a young child’s frustrated
efforts to make sense of a confounding world that values him for little more than
his capacity for work and as the most handy target for the “inarticulate rage” vented
by adults. Innerhofer’s stark, bleak descriptions, in his account of Holl’s
early childhood, are strikingly minimalist and colorless, and his characters, in
these first pages, seem almost silhouettes, as in the powerful work depicting
scenes of American slavery by visual artist Kara Walker. But a brilliantly evolving
narrative style develops along with Holl’s own growth in consciousness and self-awareness.
The early monochromatic, silhouetted world gradually gives way to one richer in
awareness and detail - albeit no less impoverished in quality of life. Holl’s sense
of himself as self, as well as his initial stirrings of rebellion, long in
coming, commence when the concept of suicide first occurs to him. His abrupt,
stunned realization of this possibility of escaping his misery through his own
agency is followed mere paragraphs later by the first instances of first-person
narration to appear in the novel. A slow-motion explosion of self-awareness
follows as the development of Holl’s young mind is paralleled by a perceptible
increase in Innerhofer’s rendering of depth and detail as well as by periodic bursts
of first person narration (that there are so pitifully few of these, however,
only underscores Holl’s primary and anguishing sense of himself as an object).
Despite the world’s coming into richer, more comprehensible focus, Holl’s
miseries continue unabated, though the sharpening of his mind does provide him
some minor triumphs in learning how to resist, neutralize, or exert some modicum
of resilience over the abuses heaped upon him. However incremental, these small
victories lead Holl to reject the option of suicide as it would only benefit his
oppressors, who “could step over me and go on humiliating and tormenting people
like me without hesitation.”

Innerhofer also employs
an intensely effective kind of dialectic in the use of third person narration
that juxtaposes and entwines simple, childlike sentences – “Every morning began
in pain;” “It was still August;” “The train moved much too slowly;” “The train
went much too fast” – with those of an omniscient narrator reporting and
interpreting Holl’s life through adult retrospection. The result is a complex
narrative style that allows a reader to be simultaneously inside Holl’s childhood world and outside it as a mature, almost clinical observer. An unusual tone is
achieved through this variation, one that combines the straightforward simple
storytelling of a children’s story or fable (one not entirely without humor) with
the critical insight of a consciousness evaluating the fable as it’s being told.[1]
Another notable narrative element is Innerhofer’s frequent use of italicized
words and phrases. These serve to stress - like an insistent finger tapping the
chest of the society Innerhofer charges with so many reprehensible failures -
the fundamental aspects of Holl’s situation that could have been altered to
make his life better. They’re used not so much to scold as to resolutely and
with overwhelming force of conviction cast light on injustices and educate ignorance,
serving as controlled, focused remonstrations without overt emotion but
nonetheless brimming with indignation. At the same time, Innerhofer uses these
italicized phrases to identify and dismantle the language of oppression, to
take it apart at a linguistic level. For example, in Holl’s musing at the way
the society characterizes suicide, one such phrase – that so and so “put an end to it” – becomes an
expression Holl sees as a consensual, passive acceptance of suicide, as though
it were an act completely independent of exogenous, societal influence, a
failure of the individual having nothing to do with its social context.

One of Innerhofer’s
great achievements in Beautiful Days is a careful balance between Holl’s
particular, grim situation and its generalizability even beyond the period and
its Austrian setting and institutions. The field labor in which Innerhofer’s
characters are engaged might stand in for any kind of menial, coercive labor.
The cruelties displayed by those around Holl could be found in other oppressive
environments. And the indignation aimed at those responsible is leveled not
simply at the malice of individuals, but at an entire society that expresses an
almost autonomic neglect of its most sensitive and vulnerable members. The
patterns of brutality and neglect so pervasive in Beautiful Days become
a condemnation not only of Austria, and not only of the country’s noxiously acquiescent
conformity perhaps most dramatically highlighted by its nearly unanimous
support of Hitler’s Anschluss (references to historical particulars are certainly
not absent in Beautiful Days, but are kept at a minimum), but of all
societies that rest on their failure to rise above the most expedient social
interactions and decline to treat kindness, generosity, and, especially, the
care of children and cultivation of talent, as fundamental priorities. Innerhofer’s
most severe criticism targets these failures across an entire society to exert agency
and responsibility, to combat the accepted and the unacceptable.

There is a generous
element in Innerhofer’s “lessons” (one that appears to distinguish it from
Bernhard’s unmitigated wrath); it may not be forgiveness exactly, but there is at
least a value placed on understanding
that the cultures’ deficiencies descend from the contributions of poverty,
institutional weaknesses, and a lack of education and opportunity. Part of the
power of Beautiful Days derives from its acknowledgement of the
psychology of brutality and neglect, its recognition of cycles of abuse and of
economic and other factors contributing to the behavior of the society, at the
same time refusing to allow these factors to absolve actors of their
responsibility. One of the novel’s most breathtaking scenes involves the sudden
appearance on Farm 48 of Helga, a no-nonsense worker who sees with piercing clarity,
as does Holl, the injustices of the culture, but who unlike Holl has the fearlessness
to refute them at every turn. Confronting The Wife one night, Helga smashes a
bowl in an act both castigating and educating, forcing The Wife to recognize that
human beings - who are not, after all, bowls to be shattered - should not be
treated as though they were. Helga’s short stay at Farm 48 is the first genuine
glimmer of hope in Holl’s miserable existence, the first real model for
resistance that life has offered him, and a vindication of his own conviction
that the behavior directed at him has been a matter of inexcusable injustice (as
well as an austerely beautiful moment in the novel - Innerhofer acutely depicts
the ability of children to know justice and injustice as a matter of the
behavior around them while also recognizing their need for adult affirmation of
these convictions).

Beautiful Days leads the reader to a simple yet radical
conclusion encapsulated in what is perhaps the most significant milestone in
Holl’s personhood, his apprehension “that it could have been different, all of
it.” With this brief line, this explicit rejection of the status quo, Innerhofer
obliterates excuses and justifications, reorienting the wretchedly deficient
adult world to a measure of morality like that asserted by Dr. Rieux in Albert
Camus’ The Plague in Rieux’s refusal “to love a scheme of things in
which children are put to torture.” I know of nothing quite like Innerhofer’s
achievement in Beautiful Days, the clear-sightedness with which, in such
a short novel, he is able to illuminate so vividly the unjust waste of years of
a child’s life (that the novel is apparently largely autobiographical may explain
much of the visceral realism of the scenes Innerhofer describes), while at the
same time delivering a blistering reproach of an entire society’s participation
in that injustice. One emerges from Beautiful Days wanting nothing less
than to insure the reality of that ideal set forth by John Dewey, that what the
wisest and best parent wants for his or her child is what the community should
want for all of its children.

In the end, the caustic
irony of Innerhofer’s title may be more complex than it at first seems. An
incisive sarcasm is intended, to be sure, but at the same time the title also
acknowledges the beauty occasioned by Holl’s rare moments of happiness and
wonder, of hope and of humanity, in the context of his otherwise crushing, mean
life. And it must surely celebrate, without irony, the path to liberated
selfhood that a sudden opportunity provides to Holl, one that mimics, in its
autobiographical element, Innerhofer’s own escape from an inexorable and
laborious childhood to pursue his becoming a writer. Perhaps, too, the title
may be a poignant and pointed acknowledgment of the writer’s essentially
aestheticizing role in his alchemical transformation of difficult experiences
into art, and a subtle reminder that behind the fiction, there’s a real world
where such unconscionable behaviors take place. It’s shattering to learn that
this author who lived as well as created such a defiant and resilient young
character would, in 2002, submit to suicide. After reading Innerhofer’s
indelible, devastating novel, one is hard put not to think of that as Austria’s
failure - and as our own as well should we not aspire to make, of all of our
days and for all in the wide scope of our care, something beautiful.

[1]Someone with a far better knowledge of Austrian
literature than I might be able to determine whether this “anti-fable” is an
intentional refutation of the romantic, moralizing work of Innerhofer’s
Austrian predecessor, Adalbert Stifter; in both Beautiful Days and in
Bernhard’s Correction one finds disparaging allusions to Stifter,
something I might not have noticed had I not coincidentally read his Rock
Crystal some months prior to reading Correction).

11 comments:

Sorry, this always happens with those Bernhard passages, I just start laughing uncontrollably. They are just the funniest things. There's a long chunk of Old Masters where he lays into Bruckner and then Stifter - or the other way? - that just kills me.

So my point is, I will have to come back to read the rest of your piece once I have recovered. "a horrible lifelong punishment for existing" - ah ha ha ha ha!

What a thought-provoking post. I don't even know where to start. I'm not familiar with Innerhofer but will most certainly try to read it. I'm a mazed about his and Bernhard's very negative view of the home country, amazed but then I must also admit, that Austria always struck me as problematic. Also when you look at its political landscape, quite different, and openly right wing and populist, very unlike Germany. It's also refreshing, to move away from the endless idealization that the word Vienna seems to trigger in writers and readers alike and the flood of sugary historical novels. Fin de siècle Vienna is long gone and Austria can most certainly not be recuded to its capital. The abuse of children does remind me of something else. I reviewed Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's short story collection (published by Pereine) and was puzzled by the choice of title. The German title is "Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht" which means "This didn't calm the children". Instead they chose the title of one of the stories "Maybe This Time". Meike from Pereine Press commented on my review saying, they couldn't keep the title as it was an Austrian book and would be immediately associated with child abuse. And there have indeed been shocking examples of this in recent years. It's deplorable that Innerhofer had to end his life but some wounds never heal properly, or so it seems. Thanks for this in-depth review.

Tom - I've read that passage aloud to friends just for the pleasure of watching their mouths drop open. But I think I have things somewhat backwards here, in that it's entirely possible that the "horrible lifelong punishment for existing, for the blameless act of having been born in the first place" may actually be a direct allusion to "Beautiful Days," which Bernhard surely knew at the time he wrote "Correction." For all its serious subject matter, Innerhofer's novel maintains a tone similar to Bernhard's, for which there must be some German term: an unusual mixture of scathing criticism with a kind of histrionic, almost congratulatory delight in the intelligence behind its delivery. So I think I was wrong to say that it's only Holl's resilience and Innerhofer's talent that makes this novel "bearable in the least." It's far more than bearable; it's compulsively readable in part thanks to this tone that borders on something akin to the high hilarity one experiences when one might just as easily laugh as cry, combined with a striking intellectual clarity. IS there a term for this?

Caroline - I found it impossible to read "Beautiful Days" without thinking of the highly publicized incidents of abuse in Austria of recent years. It's interesting that the publisher of the Hotschnig book elected to avoid having the title run the risk of being associated with child abuse, particularly as this is precisely one of Innerhofer's charges - that the culture abjectly fails to turn its attention to the abuse and neglect of its children and would just rather not hear about it.

A great review, Scott! I've been researching online and it looks like Innerhofer was largely unread in English. Wikipedia doesn't even have an English page on him. And I didn't see any reviews in Shelfari, Goodreads, and LibraryThing. He seemed to share some aspects of Bernhard's childhood in the fact that they both didn't know their father, but this book certainly showed that Innerhofer's childhood was traumatic. Bernhard was at least sheltered by his grandparents. I'm not too surprised they repudiated Stifter. Stifter's subject and style must have been too pastoral for them. In 'Rock Crystal' alone, the focus on the natural environment and the ideal childhood seemed the very antithesis of Bernhard, who must have considered it a naive 19th century lesson for protracted 20th century history. I hope to be able to read 'Correction' sometime soon. And 'Beautiful Days' if ever I find a copy.

Tony - I'm probably the last person to ask, since I've only read "Correction" so far, but for what it's worth I thought it was fantastic. And I certainly plan to read more of Bernhard's work - and Innerhofer's, should more of it turn up in translation.

Rise - I really didn't do my due diligence in researching Innerhofer; I only know what little biographical information I gleaned from a very cursory Internet search. But now I'm quite curious about his relation to and possible influence on Bernhard. Good luck finding a copy of "Beautiful Days" - it's one of a handful of out-of-print novels I'm ready to fight for to see back in print.

I went on the German amazon page to look up his book and the trail of related books, all by Austrian authors, and all circling to some extent around child abuse - Jelinek and Anna Mitgutsch among them - was a bit shocking. Meike wrote they didn't want the association because Hotschnig's book isn't about child abuse. That's fair, I think.

Tremendous review, Scott. You have a real talent for analysing the technical aspects of literature - the author's style and use of different narrative elements, for instance. I'm intrigued by your comments on the way Innerhofer allows the reader to feel as though they are simultaneously inside the child's world and outside it as an objective observer. That's very clever. As you say, there are some crucial messages for society here...

It's interesting to read Caroline's comments on Alois Hotschnig's collection of short stories too. I read it last year and wasn't aware of the original title or decision to change it for the translation into English. It's not about child abuse, so I can understand why Meike made that decision.

Thanks very much Jacqui. I thought this was an unforgettable novel, narratively complex and in terms of subject matter not easy to read but utterly gripping and with an honest indignation rare in literature. Innerhofer and Thomas Bernhard have a strikingly similar consuming anger towards Austria, but Bernhard manages to make it excruciatingly funny where I felt that Innerhofer wrote ferociously just to stay afloat. It's a shame the other volumes in this trilogy aren't available in English (to my knowledge).